Encountering unsettling stories of sport coaching violence: practitioner reflections on attending an interactive and immersive installation on the topic of abuse in sport.

Abstract

This study examines sport practitioner experiences of attending an interactive installation, which was designed by the authors to bring to life athlete voices from previously collected data (Kavanagh, 2014; Kavanagh et al., 2017) on the experience of abuse in sport. Guided by art-informed pedagogy, an immersive audio-visual experience was constructed. Sport practitioners, including sport coaches and sport psychologists, were invited to attend the exhibition to be confronted by athletes’ verbatim stories of abuse. Sixty participants attended the exhibition with thirty-one (n=31, 15 female, 16 Male, Mage = 27.4) providing post-event qualitative questionnaire reflections on attending the event and seven (n=7, 2 male, 5 female, Mage =37.1) subsequently participating in semi-structured interviews to develop an in-depth insight into their experiences of the event. In this paper we share the themes generated from the qualitative data: (1) practitioners experienced the physical space of the event as ‘moving’ and ‘difficult’ both physically and emotionally, (2) the experience reverberated beyond the event, compelling participants to reflexively make sense of their emotions, and; (3) empowered thoughts around practice and change. We further reflect on the potential of interactive approaches to sharing data on sensitive topics within future practitioner education contexts.